This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

convictions

Although the number of rape convictions rose from 2,689 to 2,991 between 2015 and 2016, the overall conviction rate fell from 57.9 per cent to 57.6 per cent over the period. . . .

One senior crown court judge told The Times that the CPS’s Rasso units — specialist groups charged with investigating rapes and serious sexual assaults — often had too few resources to investigate. “They have got an awful lot of cases and they don’t have the number of lawyers, or the lawyers of sufficient calibre to be able to review them properly,” the judge said. “You often end up on the first day of the trial with complaints being made. The conviction rate for rape is still frustratingly low.”

Although the number of rape convictions rose from 2,689 to 2,991 between 2015 and 2016, the overall conviction rate fell from 57.9 per cent to 57.6 per cent over the period. Last month three men walked free from court having been cleared of rape in separate cases, leading to questions about whether they should have been prosecuted.

Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, told the BBC last week that an acquittal was not an indication of failure. “These are very difficult offences to prosecute and a jury has to be certain beyond all reasonable doubt,” she told Radio 4’s Today. “We would not want to be in a position where we only take cases that are going to succeed because we would rightly be accused of being risk-averse.”